9 Jul 2000 nullity   » (Master)

Ah... It has been far too long. :-) I'm not entirely disillusioned with the art of the public diary, though I have realized that I must compensate for the lack of physical and description and life-story narration with more of the ecletic jumble contending with reality for my mind in fragile equilibrium. Oh yes! I am indeed teetering on the edge of insanity.
 
And in the land of dark hackery I have little of note to report, being caught in the doldrums of bug fixing. Upon the distant horizon I see hopes of spending meager amounts of time on a drag bar (e.g. an alternative to cut-n-paste), but we shall have to see. A lot of what I am doing is writing testing tools to verify others', erm, less than perfect implementations. Not the most terribly exciting stuff in the world, but it does engage my time :-)
 

This was a while back, but it does have some reflection on directions my life may be heading in the near future. I talked with Rebecka Schulman (sp?) for quite a while one night while we both worked late at Eazel. It was somewhat disheartening for I found that she has shockingly similar interests to mine...but developed several more years (e.g. I am at the beginning of my undergraduate experience, and she has already done graduate studies for a while). So the more I discovered similar interests and goals the more I became disheartened by her apparent disillisionment with much of computer science. This is not to say that I was merely depressed by her lack of enthusiasm, because she is doing many very interesting things with Medusa in great earnest. Rather her perspectives as somebody who has sampled my dreams already was worrisome - simply because it robbed me of some measure of foolish idealism. The issues she raised I have already heard, they are obvious. But hearing "myself" in a sense uttering them, or rather somebody who I sense would have similar views as myself with a great deal more experience (eg Rebecka), I was forced to actually consider them, and I found much of it to be true.
 

Computers are a rather trivial pursuit. If you are not doing something with them that makes them work towards other more worthy ends - you must acknowledge that what you are doing with your life is playing. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but in my particular case it is difficult to accept. I think this may mean that I need to find out why I'm doing what I'm doing. Part of it...is because I do derive pleasure out of architecting elegant solutions, yes. But is immediate pleasure sufficient impetus to purse something as my life? I don't know, but I think not. So now I am left with either attempting to deduce a meaningful rational for pursuing computer science theory, or I must supplement it with other pursuits...or I must shallow myself and accept it as is. I doubt I can do the latter, or rather I wish not to and so choose not to consider it a viable option.
 
Being therefore disillusioned concerning the nature of computers by talking too much with Rebecka...I have decided to pursue other venues of expression and general temporal consumption. Perhaps the most easily doable for personal edification is to write. Now I have engaged myself quite thorougly this summer in writing poetry, but as I am not exactly an epic poet :-)... this is a disjunctious process. So I have the grain of a novel and intend to start work on it. It is rather frustrating for beautiful sections of writing pass fleetingly through my mind as I work upon the mechanisms of the world itself...frustrating because I rather suspect myself to be at a loss for such passages once I apply myself to the pen (I don't much relish writing fiction at a computer for some odd reason, yes I know its silly but...I am a beast of whimsy and it makes me feel more, oh I don't know, more...poetic? to write in such a primitive fashion :-).

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